Lessons Learned from Origins Game Fair 2026

In the footsteps of other game designers, I will do my best to document lessons learned along my own journey. Today I look back at Origins Game Fair 2026, hosted by GAMA in Columbus, Ohio.

I decided to spring for a show floor booth on a whim after The Bonsai Diary was nominated for an Origins Award in the category of Role-Playing Game. Thanks to the goodwill and generosity of The Bodhana Group, a nonprofit devoted to therapeutic applications of tabletop games, I was able to sublet a booth well past the signup deadline.

I set the same goals for boothing this convention as I had with everything else I’d done for The Bonsai Diary: (1) don’t lose money, (2) have fun, and (3) learn something. After all, this game’s journey has been a series of firsts: the first game I ever released, the first game I ever signed (to a publisher who then backed out), the first game I ever crowdfunded, the first game I’ve had nominated for an award. Getting a booth at the convention where that award would be announced seemed a natural, and perhaps final, step in the journey.

Most publishers see conventions as a way to connect with audiences and gain exposure. But I don’t have a brand to build. Instead, I decided to promote not myself, but “journaling games” as a whole. I wouldn’t just sell Bonsai Diaries; I would sell the movement.

Just weeks before the convention, I reached out to some other journaling game designers to see if I might rep their deeper cuts. Indie Press Revolution had just announced their Origins catalog, so I could see which games were left out. (It’s bad form to compete with your distributor, though IPR was gracious enough to stock The Bonsai Diary anyway).

Thus I ended up with titles from Junk Food Games, Exeunt Games, Steph Campbell (TTRPG Kids), and Paul Czege. I might have done more, but it would have required more displays, more table space, and more risk carrying consigned goods that could be damaged, lost, or stolen.

When I first started selling games, I decided not to sell tchotchkes to boost revenue. I wanted to stay focused on what I did myself, even if that left money on the table. I did, however, decide to sell brush pens because I see them as truly enhancing the Bonsai Diary experience for players who wanted them.

How did I do on the easiest-to-measure goal? Mission accomplished: with a caveat…

Note that my expenses did NOT include travel, lodging, or food. These were all costs I was going to incur anyway as an Origins attendee – but if I did count them, I’d be many hundreds in the red.

Also, I did not booth on Sunday, the final day of the convention, perhaps forfeiting a few hundred dollars. My caravan needed to be home by late afternoon, and there was a long road ahead of us.

Running a booth comes at a huge opportunity cost for me: I didn’t get much of a chance to circulate the rest of the floor, play games, or even meet up with a co-designer who was playtesting our game at Unpub.

In exchange, I did talk to a lot of players, which I enjoy immensely. These conversations are “fun” in the sense that they also inform my game design. And I got to meet some designers I look up to, even ending up on one of their podcasts!

In prepping for Origins, I asked designers from the Building the Game community who’d boothed last year for tips. So I started with a boost:

I also did a mini-trial of my booth at a local convention, GameFace Con, just a few weeks earlier, to work out most of the above.

Here’s a few new things I picked up:

My boothmates were offered a shelf in the display area, and they generously shared that shelf with me. I had to borrow a book stand (thank you, Wet Ink Games!) and hand-write a placard to take advantage of the opportunity. Next time I want to have literal construction paper, X-acto knife, scissors, and tape for this kind of thing.

To avoid extra spending, rather than buy convention backdrops, I painted over some cheap privacy screens that my household no longer wanted. I justified this massive timesink by turning the project into a statement: look how journaling games can be messy and imperfect! Human-made triumphs over AI-generated!

It was high-minded… and wrong. A convention booth is not an art gallery – if you considered what I made, art. Better than a blank booth, to be sure, but I misunderstood the assignment:

A “statement” talks at an audience. A booth needs to pull in an audience.

In retrospect, I should have approached my booth like a game design challenge. For example, I might have painted blank trees on those screens that passerby could decorate with their own hand-drawn leaves. It would have saved a lot of time, and been more effective at drawing the audience in, and better made my point about hand-made art.

If you missed my booth at Origins, you can still get The Bonsai Diary from Indie Press Revolution, Tabletop Bookshelf, or Knave of Cups.

I’ll likely be boothing again at Hawkland Gaming Festival (Sep 19) and PeopleCon III (Oct 17). I’ll be there learning, playing, and sharing!